LGBTQ People Of Color Say They Feel Twice As Much Police Discrimination As White LGBTQ People, & May Avoid Contacting The Police As A Result

Bustleby JR ThorpeNovember 29, 2017

A new report published by the Harvard T.H. Chan School Of Public Health has revealed that LGBTQ Americans, and particularly LGBTQ people of color, say they experience more police discrimination than non-LGBTQ people, and can go out of their way to avoid dealing with them, at a cost to their own safety and health. The study, co-produced by NPR and the public health research organization The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, did extensive telephone interviews with 3,453 Americans over four months starting in January 2017, and looked at the answers of the 489 people who identified as LGBTQ. It’s important to note here that this group was “nationally representative,” racially — it had 61 percent white respondents and 39 percent people of color — but that there weren’t enough people in each non-white ethnic or racial category to make specific observations about each.

While the survey looked at discrimination across a range of areas, from housing to the workplace, the statistics about discrimination when interacting with the police force stood out by the size of their numbers. The people surveyed in the study said that talking to police was the top area in which LGBTQ people encounter discrimination, along with the workplace.